I’m just pissed this unimaginative fuck keeps stealing names/words from actually intelligent people.
Elon doesn’t grok shit, he’s a racisted capitalist bigot, the exact opposite of what Stranger in a Strange Land represented.
It was known as “the hippie Bible” and was very explicitly against pretty much every form of private ownership.
I bet Elon’s poser ass never even read a summary
He prefers Ayn Rand and rejoicing in the death of non-capitalists.
Grokking is actually a concept in ML, when a model’s loss start suddenly lower far after it is considered to have overfit. That notion was named by researchers, I’ll let people decide if it is aptly named, but Elon likely just took it from there.
The term “grok” predates ML by decades.
But that’s not what they were saying. They simply said that the term “grokking” is a term in the ML world, so there is some precedence in naming a model “Grok” that doesn’t directly relate to the “preexisting” term that loosely means “to understand”.
I mean, the term in ML is named after the original term, so it kinda does.
My point is that using “grokking” in ML is not a Musk/Twitter/Whatever-his-Ai-company-is-named invention, it predates their use.
Yes the original researchers reused a pre-existing meaning, which has been in internet for a while before. I did not know it came from Heinlein and I did not know its full meaning. I remember seeing it first, more than a decade ago, in a text that explained without any explanation that an isolated unknown word can easily be groked from context. Demonstrating it immediately. To me (and I guess to those researchers) “grok” means “understanding from context” which is particularly appropriate in the context.
BTW Elon was not the only one to reuse this word. Another company named Groq, totally unrelated to Musk as far as I know, designs AI acceleration chips.
And it’s still a poser move for Elon to use it.
And we aren’t just talking about a technical quibble, such as picking a usage license that’s not as open as another (Grok is Apache 2.0, if you’re wondering).
It isn’t a “technical quibble” to point out licences like RAIL-M violate several points of the open source definition.
With AI, this is arguably not possible at all, because the way machine learning models are created involves a largely unknowable process whereby a tremendous amount of training data is distilled into a complex statistical representation the structure of which no human really directed, or even understands.
Such a well-worded description. TechCrunch seems to know their shit.
